Tipping Towards Tomorrow: Understanding the Triggers and Dynamics of Sudden Societal Shifts

If we are to address the global crises currently facing humanity (e.g. climate change, pandemics), a widespread change in the norms, conventions, and other paradigms underlying our social systems is needed. Such change typically occurs via social tipping, a process in which, after a critical mass of conversion from a status quo convention to an alternative has been reached, a self-propelling process that guarantees an explosive shift to the alternative among the rest of the population is triggered. In the present thesis, we devise and apply an experimental method that recreates social tipping. Doing so allows us to, across the three empirical chapters of this dissertation, examine how social tipping comes about and how it unfolds.

In Chapter 2, we devise the aforementioned experimental method and apply it to examine the role of identifiability in tipping. We find that identifiability delays the abandonment of a status quo convention within a group. In Chapter 3, we further apply the same methodology to examine the role of minority consistency in tipping. We discover that a consistent minority is perceived as more confident, which leads to a higher likelihood of tipping, but also as uncompromising, which leads to the opposite—it decreases tipping likelihood. In Chapter 4, we extend this experimental method with agent-based simulations and look at the dynamics driving change after a tipping point has been reached. We observe that an interplay between peoples’ motivations to remain inert yet follow societal trends produces the shape of s-curves characteristic of social tipping.